Reason No. (Who’s Counting?) as to why there are no sports like San Diego sports.

Homegrown Padre Carlos Quentin misses the season’s first 49 games with a bum knee, finally gets to play in Chicago and whips the Cubs into gummy bears. He hits three home runs, scores five times, drives in six runs, bats over .500, and despite his efforts with and against the Wrigley wind, the worst team in baseball gets swept.

So Twitter’s all atwitter. Trade the guy. He’s 30 years old. Prone to injury. He’s going to be a free agent. Get something for him.

And I say, no. Keep him. Re-sign him. Give the suffering fans in this town a hook on which to hang their hat. Be somebody for a change. Man up. It’s time to stop taking organizational laxatives and eat some cheese, rice and crow — you know, something that binds.

Look, I’ve lived here my entire life so I’ve seen them all come only to see so many of them high-tail it to the airport, in many cases bringing nothing or little in return. Lance Alworth. Jack Kemp. Dave Winfield. Ozzie Smith. John Jefferson. Fred Dean. Fred McGriff. James Brooks. Louie Kelcher. Junior Seau. Rodney Harrison. Jim Lachey. Jake Peavy. Adrian Gonzalez. Vincent Jackson. Darren Sproles. Drew Brees. Even Ernesto Frieri, who’s now the Angels’ Mariano Rivera.

I must be missing some athletes. It’s exhausting. Help me out.

San Diego has become professional sports’ greatest proving ground. Develop them, get the people excited, and then, when you either can’t pay them, get ticked at them or see a way to get cheap warm bodies, show them the front end of your wingtip.

Well, tourniquet the hemorrhage. Stop this frugal bleeding. The fact that the Padres still draw enough people to sell peanuts staggers me. There are baseball fans here, all right, and they deserve better. Many of them can’t even see this folly on TV. But for some reason, they refuse to revolt against this revolting development.

Here’s hoping the new Padres owner, whoever that may be, spins the wheel and changes course. The Padre Philosophy is noble. Building from within is the right idea in baseball’s crazy fiscal world. But it hasn’t worked. Even General Manager Josh Byrnes can’t see a superstar in the minor league system. This franchise is underfunded and unfortunate.

The Padres, able to draft good arms, have put them to use and managed to build teams through trades. But that well, obviously, has dried up. The 2012 Padres have yet to win 20 games and will not play nine innings of importance for six months because they can’t do most things necessary to succeed, other than run some and pitch a little.

They have virtually no power (last in baseball in home runs) and drive in runs … well, they don’t drive in runs. When a Padre manages to get himself into scoring position, his best chance of going home is to get in his car.

But a player such as Quentin can help. He’s not Josh Hamilton, but at 30 (Hamilton’s 31) he isn’t old, he’s smart (Stanford) and has pop. Maybe he won’t hit 40 home runs in Petco National Park — would Babe Ruth? — but he’s a player to be feared, as Gonzalez was. If the Padres trade him, they’re going to get prospects, and prospects are prospects until they’re no longer prospects.

“I’ve known Carlos a long time,” Byrnes says. “In just a few games, he’s already shown what he can do. Other teams are going to be interested in his services and it’s not something we can ignore.”

But will Quentin be traded?

“I’d like to see this team look like we hoped it would look,” Byrnes says. “We just want to win some games and get something going. I don’t see us having a huge motivation to trade Carlos, even though he’s going to be a free agent. That certainly isn’t foremost on my mind. He probably has more value to us.”

Exactly. He has more value here because he’s an honest to goodness big league ballplayer who won’t get caught in the San Diego-to-Tucson revolving door. The Padres have used forty-some-odd players this season. That’s indecent.

We are going to continue to hear all kinds of excuses.

• That this ownership thing has seeped into the clubhouse. I can’t believe ballplayers much give a damn who’s paying them. Paychecks have not been missed.

• That it’s manager Bud Black’s fault. Was it his fault when the Padres came within a game of the playoffs two years ago? Bah. The man is an artist without a brush. You can’t finger paint in baseball.

• That the blame can be placed on hitting coaches Phil Plantier and Alonzo Powell. Since moving into Petco, this franchise has been through more hitting coaches than Larry King has wives. They can’t all be incompetent. I’ve always thought the best hitting coaches are batsmen who can hit.

Petco. I’m so tired of Petco. Move the fences in, so it will make it easier for opponents to hit the ball out. Hit the ball hard. Hit it someplace where somebody isn’t. There’s plenty of room out there.

It can’t be blamed on Carlos Quentin. Let’s see what he can do.

“He’s a local guy we specifically targeted,” Byrnes says. “He has power and we need power. He’s a badass. I can’t see us on July 31st (trading deadline) getting what we can for him. We have questions to answer with other things.

“We have to keep all our options open and I’d never say never. But there are a lot of reasons to keep him here.”